SugarCRM the provider of open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced it will release several functional and performance testing tools under open source licenses for use with web-enabled applications, including all versions of SugarCRM’s award winning applications.

The announcement was made at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), and is said to ‘better enables SugarCRM developers, partners and customers to create custom enhancements and build solutions on SugarCRM’s products’.

The new testing tools build upon SugarCRM’s announcement earlier this year that it has created a public source code tree for Sugar developers. Now, partners and developers have access not just to a public source code tree, but also powerful testing tools to develop and insure top performance of their custom code.

The new open source projects include:

SODA – an XML-based testing framework leveraging Watir. Watir is an open source Ruby library for automating web browser interactions. SODA simplifies the process of creating browser test automation, allowing non-programmers to successfully develop and execute in-depth test suites against web based applications.

SodaMachine – a graphical user interface (GUI) tool for creating, editing and debugging SODA tests. SodaMachine will be available initially for Windows and Linux.

MeterMaid – a lightweight XML language that simplifies the process of writing Apache JMeter tests for the HTTP protocol.

SugarMMM (MeterMaid Maker) – a utility for automatically generating MeterMaid XML for load testing against a given SugarCRM instance.

TidBit – a data generator for SugarCRM that is capable of generating massive amounts of data in a SugarCRM instance for use in scalability and performance testing.

These tools will be made available within 30 days at SugarCRM’s SugarForge developer site. Learn more at http://developers.sugarcrm.com/opensource.

For more information about SugarCRM’s open source projects and community, visit http://sugarforge.org.